Time is a funny thing. This is not a new revelation. The passage of time has inspired writers, poets, musicians and artists for all of, well, time itself. It has been said that time is relative and while that statement is surely true, it is alarmingly simple and profound simultaneously, offering no answers or closure to those who have pondered the essence of time.

For me, time has been flying by. The days, weeks, months have passed, seemingly with every blink of my eyes (hence this being my first post in, gulp, over three months!). Yet, I feel like so much has happened and I’ve done and seen so many things that it couldn’t have possibly occurred in such a short amount of time. Therein lies the paradox of this relativity of time.

With travel being a constant in my life right now, I am often measuring time according to my destinations. My mindset revolves around how long it’s been since my last trip, or counting down the days until my next one. When I returned to Sisaket in May, after traveling for a month, time slowly inched along because my upcoming vacation to Boston in August seemed like light years away. The euphoria from my last trip drained away at the same time that excitement for my homecoming crescendoed. Before I knew it, what had felt like an eternity was gone in a flash.

The reflection and anticipation between adventures relates to time more often in the short term though. However, different times in your life are inevitably linked to places where you’ve been, lived in, learned from and left parts of yourself behind. I’ve been living in Thailand for almost a year and as that milestone approaches, I’ve thought back on who I was when I arrived and how much I’ve grown since then. I contemplated this evolution after my two weeks in Boston as well. Spending some time in the place that was my childhood home as well as the city where I spent most of my adult life, put in perspective how that time of my life, in many ways, was over. It’s no less important and a part of myself will always be there but I’ve entered a new stage, and time, of my life. It’s a little heartbreaking to realize that such significant time has passed but it’s also exhilarating to think about all there is to come.

Whether I’m focusing on the hours dragging during a slow day at school, wondering if the week will ever end, or I’m feeling astonished that six months disappeared and I can barely believe that it’s the mid-semester break already, or I’m lost in thought over how I’ve lived my life so far, I know that time is what you make of it. So I’m going to make sure to keep living life to the fullest and be grateful for all the good times I’ve had.